Building Red America and Whistling Past Dixie
What's the Matter With the Democrats?
Two very different takes on how the party can find its way back to power.
BUILDING RED AMERICA
The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power
  (Phil Foster) |
By Thomas B. Edsall
Basic. 320 pp. $26
WHISTLING PAST DIXIE
How Democrats Can Win Without the South
By Thomas F. Schaller
Simon & Shuster. 336 pp. $26
Everyone has advice for the Democrats these days. If you're ever stranded on a desert island, the quickest way to get attention may not be to launch a signal flare but to declare your candidacy as a Democrat. Someone will be with you shortly to explain what you should do.
The minority party attracts so many caring advisers because it has lost five of the last seven presidential elections and is constitutionally prone to deep bouts of soul-searching. It is going through such an identity crisis now, as liberal activists debate with those in the center-left over how to win back the majority. Making the situation especially urgent is the tantalizing disarray in the GOP ranks: Neoconservatives have been discredited by the Iraq quagmire, Northeastern moderates dislike Southern social conservatives, and small-government-loving fiscal worriers are outraged at the GOP-led government's lack of budgetary restraint. As the midterm elections loom, Democrats have an opportunity; they just need the right plan to embrace their moment.
Thomas B. Edsall and Thomas F. Schaller have both contributed well-documented and thoughtful arguments that might help direct Democrats out of their wilderness. Edsall's accessible Building Red America is not presented as a guidebook but as a tour of the political landscape. Republicans have learned how to manage that landscape and adapt more quickly to changes on it. Democrats, on the other hand, keep losing for a reason: Their party is no longer a populist coalition, but it keeps trying to run as one, and its leaders fail to understand the connection between middle-class voters' economic self-interest and their concerns about cultural values.
These days, both parties have abandoned the middle ground. Republicans don't care about it, and Democrats aren't talented enough to find it. But in this dim world, Republicans keep coming out on top. "The Republican Party holds a set of advantages, some substantial and some marginal," Edsall writes, and unless Democrats find a way to solve their problems, "the odds are that the Republican Party will continue to maintain, over the long run, a thin but durable margin of victory."
